While the Arctic and the Antarctic experience similar greenhouse gas levels and solar radiation, each region responds in a dramatically different way, especially in temperature and loss of sea ice, says an international team of scientists that includes a NOAA oceanographer. While the Arctic is warming, most of Antarctica is not, largely because of the ozone hole, but projections indicate that is likely to change.

A new on-line map makes it possible, for the first time, to track disease outbreaks around the world that threaten the health of wildlife, domestic animals, and people. The Global Wildlife Disease News Map was developed jointly by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey.

During the last decades, temperature maxima were regularly broken. A new study to be published May 1st in the international science magazine “Nature” suggests that a reprieve may be expected over the next decade, as natural climate variations may temporarily offset the long-term warming trend. This result was obtained by researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Scientists probing volcanic rocks from deep under the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean have discovered a special geochemical signature until now found only in the southern hemisphere. The rocks were dredged from the remote Gakkel Ridge, which lies under 3,000 to 5,000 meters of water; it is Earth’s most northerly undersea spreading ridge. The study appears in the May 1 issue of the leading science journal Nature.

Past Earth Science and Climate Change News

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